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Wednesday, 2 April 2014

Ero Guro; Body horror and Libertinism in Japanese art.

The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife (1814) by Katsushika Hokusai

Sexuality and eroticism have always been large parts of the culture and folklore of Japan, this is evident in the art, poetry and folktales salvaged over hundreds of years, and is something we especially associate with modern Japan. In the west, we often parody what we believe to be quintessentially Japanese porn. Tentacles, school girls, pseudo-torture, pretty much anything that deviates from the reverse cowgirl on a black leather office couch, they've all become common tropes in modern Japanese pornography and sexuality. What you might not know, however, is that grotesque and violent sexual depictions in Japanese art is not a new phenomenon. Surreal body horror and over-the-top eroticism are so deeply embedded in Japanese culture that you can find traces of them in myth and ancient art.

Examples of a distinctly Japanese intrigue with bodily deformity and genitalia can be found in mythological creatures such as the Rokurokubi and the Tanuki (A Japanese raccoon with giant testicles). The Rokurokubi is perhaps the most interesting of the two as she has been replicated time and time again in Japanese porn, manga, horror and sci-fi, in one way or another. She is perhaps one of the very blueprints for the popular Japanese body horror, a woman with an extremely long, snake-like neck, she casts that eerie and unsettling image that many Asian horror films have been trying to replicate for decades. That is, in my opinion, the very basis for Japanese horror, and what makes it stand out from the rest of the world; a Japanese horror film doesn't try to jump at you, it will show you something slightly familiar (the human body), but distorted and deformed enough to chill you to the core. Think Tokyo Gore Police, Meatball Machine, for modern examples.

Junji Ito

Kazuo Umezu

Manga artists and writers such as Junji Ito and Kazuo Umezu are perfect examples of those who use deformity and sexuality as primary tools of horror in Japanese art. Though there are many horror manga titles that employ these same tools, I still believe that it is the Japanese Shock/Gore, or Cat III (Category 3) films that you find the more disturbing visuals and Sade-esc plot lines.

Horrors of Malformed Men (1969) Teruo Ishii

Promo poster for Teruo Ishii's Shogun's Joys of Torture

And, obviously, there are plenty more modern examples.

Deformity and sexuality in Mutant Girl Squad

Deformity and sexuality in Tokyo Gore Police

As you can see from some of the images above, the horror is found in the human body itself. Mutilation is one aspect of gore and horror films, but we know what mutilation looks like, we are desensitized to graphic depictions of mutilation. So how does one go about shocking when we know what a spread torso looks like? We look to the Japanese tradition of Ero Guro, the deformed and the sexual, the mutation and the body. We can recognize the figure as something close to a human, but only so much. It is in those tiny similarities between human and mutant that we find the true essence of the erotic grotesque, the Ero Guro, the body horror.

We could look to figures like H.P. Lovecraft and Marquis de Sade as inspiration for this aritstic movement founded officially in the 1930s, but that would be to ignore Japan's rich history of the kaidan (ghost story) and the nation's long history and love affair with the erotic, spiritual and the disturbing.

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